Mobile communication systems allow a mobile phone to be used in different environments such that the voice of the near end user is mixed with a variety of types and levels of background noise surrounding the near end user. Mobile phones now have at least two microphones, a primary or “bottom” microphone, and a secondary or “top” microphone, both of which will pick up both the near-end user's voice and background noise. Speech picked up by a microphone in a typical office or home usually suffers from the phenomenon of reverberation because the speech generated by the talker has a direct path to the microphone as well as other paths due to reflections from walls, ceilings, and other objects. Speech picked up in this manner sounds distant. Automatic speech recognition engines suffer from increased error rates for recognition in these conditions.